Samara McIlroy

The Lost Sock is often empty and very, very quiet, but useful for drying sheets when it rains for days on end (and yes it does rain in Tasmania). My local laundromat is a perfectly functional space, but boring. Your nearest laundromat may be a bit like mine, a place where nothing much happens. Imagine…

Here in the Southern Hemisphere, we are approaching the most fruitful time of the year. The harvest of apples, pears and stonefruit is underway and new season fruit is available for purchase in our supermarkets and grocery stores. Unfortunately, most of these fruits will be sprayed with pesticides and transported thousands of kilometres across our…

Growing vegetables in your own home has abundant benefits, including money-saving, environmental sustainability, and even as a source of creativity. From our garden patch in inner-city Melbourne, we produced abundant crops of garlic, lettuce, herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers and other vegetable goodies. Sometimes our crops were so successful we were able to share the excess produce…

From his mobile burger van, Raph serves up “the best burgers in Melbourne”. The menu is simple, featuring a Raph burger with grass-fed beef, a Shroom burger (mushrooms) for vegetarians, and fries with “stereo” sauce. That’s it. And you can only find out where the van is located via Twitter, or on the website. What is…

“A globally unique non-profit bar” will soon open in Melbourne. Shebeen Bar is a social business that will be entirely financed by investors with a social conscience. By drinking at Shebeen, you will be supporting development projects in developing nations. The organisers promise that AUD$2 profit from each drink sale will be donated to a development aid project in that drink’s country of origin.

Use your iPhone to have a psychogeographical experience in your own city. Inspired by the Situationists, Serendipitor is a free app that utilizes Google Map’s API to “find something by looking for something else.” Begin by entering a destination, from which Serendipitor suggests various routes, which are shorter or longer, depending on how much time…

On Saturday afternoon, after the Salamanca Markets have packed up for another week, Hobart can be very quiet. Tourists have departed in their campervans to explore Tasmania’s delights, while residents have fled the city centre for their comfortable suburban homes on Hobart’s outskirts. In a derelict building, next to an ugly asphalt wasteland (home to…